Enterprises are increasingly capturing, storing, and mining a plethora of information related to communications with their customers. Often this information is stored and indexed within databases. Once the information is indexed, queries are developed on an as-needed basis to mine the information from the database for a variety of organizational goals.
Typically, these queries or mining applications are limited to pre-defined customer segments represented as hierarchical relationships within the database. But, data mining constrained to pre-defined hierarchical relationships can only produce relevant information within the context of these pre-defined relationships. In other words, newly discovered relationships of importance must be manually represented within the pre-existing relationships before the information related to the new relationships can be explored within the database.
Also, the queries or mining applications often rely on pre-existing measures; many of which come pre-packaged as features of a particular database's Application Programming Interface (API). Yet, frequently an analyst may have a unique situation that necessitates aggregated measures or even new measures. In these cases, the analyst typically requests that a developer custom produce the needed measures. This results in lost time and increases an enterprise's expense. Furthermore, if the time lag is substantial the desired measure may become worthless or meaningless as events in the marketplace transpire or time-sensitive opportunities are lost.
Finally, the queries and mining applications are often executed or produced using different tools and interfaces. Thus, an analyst has to use or become fluent in multiple tools or interfaces to effectively achieve a desired query or mining application.
Moreover, some tasks that the analyst may need to do to produce a desired query or mining application may result in using multiple different aspects of a same tool or interface. In other words, the needed features are not integrated in a seamless manner within the same tool or interface that the analyst uses.
Thus, it can be seen that improved mechanisms, tools, and/or interfaces for producing and using applications associated with database analysis are desirable.